Semantic politics and the “Way of ideas” in 17th century England

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국정치학회
· 수록지 정보 : 한국정치학회보 / 49권 / 6호 / 109 ~ 139페이지
· 저자명 : 톰슨 벤자민 크리스토퍼

초록

This article considers a discourse on the philosophy of language and its social and political characteristics extant in the latter half of the 17th Century in England. It has been suggested that intellectual developments concerning semantics, or the way words signified ideas and the makeup of those ideas, lead to a crisis of representation in the period. This crisis might yield, we are sometimes told, intractable agonism not only over policy but over language itself, or lead to the slow unravelling of the ability of language, as it was then understood, to comprehend moral and political discourse at all. Politics would have to do without rational language. By studying a range of roughly contemporaneous thinkers, John Locke, Richard Bruthogge, John Wilkins, and John Sergeant, and their common French source the Port Royal Logic, this paper suggests that actually linguistic stability and linguistic reform were credible tenets given the intellectual resources available for these thinkers. They advanced related epistemologies of ideas that would allow common and stable, meanings despite their similar belief in the disunion of ideas from material sources of experience. They likewise elaborated accounts of logical communication which, in turn, built on these common and transparent epistemic foundations. The sources of linguistic abuse in social affairs were thought of as either results of languages in their unreformed state or of the passionate abuse of language. With the right virtues, or counter-passions, deployed in conjunction with more logical discourse, these thinkers imagined real progress could be made in ending the verbal sources of strife and promoting common moral norms. These recommendations create a civil approach to semantic reform.

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